Death in reverse…

they eventually wheel my father off the corridor and into a side room.

It says STOREROOM on the door and it still is a storeroom but now it’s also full of machines under its shelves of things and my father hooked up to the machines.

What I can see of the junior medic’s face is grey with tiredness and yet she’s still kind, takes her time with me, stands away from me but with me, at the entrance to the ward beyond which I can see my father in the bed through the door of the old storeroom, I can see the angle of his head, I can see the oxygen thing over his face.

The porter who helped us into the building and found us a holding space with the people on the trolleys told me that someone just gone had just been moved out of this storeroom and that this is our luck.

The medic tells me a lot of things. Then she says, You can’t stay. I’m sorry. We’ll keep you informed.

Will it be okay? I ask her.

She looks straight at me.

Touch and go, she says.

Then she asks me to forgive her and excuse her. She turns to what needs her next.

I realize she seems to be wearing a binbag.

Someone else comes to the door and asks me to leave. This person is also wearing a binbag.

Are there still shortages? I say.

When weren’t there? she says.

We’ll phone you, someone else wearing a binbag says.

I put my hands in my pockets but I have no idea what I’ve done with the car key.

The junior medic on her way elsewhere must’ve sensed my panic. She calls across the corridor.

Does your car need a key in the ignition to start it? I bet when you go back to it and check the ignition you’ll find the key still in it.

She is right. When I trace the car back to where I left it slewed half in and half out of one of the parking spaces, its engine is still running and one

of the back doors still wide open like someone’s just got out of it.

I close the open door. I get in the front. I reverse out, pull the car in properly to the space, park it properly.

I switch the car off. I sit for a moment.

I start the car again.

I have no idea where to go.

—

Twelve hours earlier.

While we’re waiting between one thing and another, by which I mean between the thing that’s just happened to his heart and the thing that’s about to, for the ambulance that’s not going to be able to come because there aren’t enough ambulances because so many other people are still such urgent emergencies too, my father looks at the blanket I’ve covered his legs with, pushes it off him like it’s burning him and before I can stop him has rolled himself out of the armchair on to the floor and is trying to lever himself up against the bedside table and I am shouting.

He says he has to take the dog for a walk, always takes the dog for a walk at this time of day, imperative that he take the dog for a walk right now.

You don’t, dad, I say, it’s half past four in the morning now, look, still dark, you don’t take the dog this early.

He slumps into himself, lets go of the bedside table, lets his whole self heap down on to the rug again.

Then he flails with one arm behind his back and brings out a shoe from beneath the bed. He pushes half his bare foot into the shoe. He isn’t able to get the rest of his foot in.

He’s saying something.

A girl. A girl will be wandering, no, wondering. A girl who says hello to him and the dog, she passes him on a bicycle on his dogwalk on weekdays. It seems to matter to him that it’s weekdays. Then he asks me what day it is today.

You can’t, I say.

He shakes his head.

He says the word.

Companion.

Then he says,

Abble.

He tells me like it’s urgent that one day she said hello as she went past and the next day he said it back and now they say hello on weekdays.

Jest, he says.

Jest? I say.

Gesture, he says.

Dad, I say. Don’t be silly. You’re not going anywhere.

Then he tells me I’m not to do the dishes that are in his sink downstairs in the kitchen because I never do them properly and they’re never clean when I do them.

Then he stops speaking.

He sits leaning sideways on the floor with both his arms round the legs of the bedside table. The shoe sticks weirdly off the top of his foot.

I’m standing above him waving my arms in the air.

I am, as ever, useless.

—

Three hours earlier.

Half past one in the morning.

My phone buzzes. My father has sent me a text. It says: Cant move

The last couple of times we’ve spoken on the phone he’s been talking about downsizing. What for? I’d said. Your house is perfect.

Feel like a change, he said.

That’s a bit vague, I said.

Nothing vague about it, he said. I’d like a fresh start.

In the middle of a pandemic and at the age of nearly eighty you want a fresh start, I said.

Houses are fetching a good price right now, he said. Houses with gardens.

You like your garden, I said.

I’d like a bigger garden, he said. And a smaller house.

At your age? I said.

What’s your problem with me wanting to live my life? he said. You who’s always lived your own life so, so, –

I know he’s thinking the word selfishly.

My problem is it’ll be me who has to do the moving work, I said. Then the gardening work.

That’ll be bloody likely, he says. Never done a real day’s work in your life.

Moving’s one of the five most stressful things anyone can do in a life, I say.

I’m asking nothing of you, he said. I wish I’d never said a bloody word.

He hung up.

Now I look at the words on my phonescreen. Cant move. Good. He’s come to his senses. But he usually goes to bed at ten. So he’s clearly up in the middle of the night still stressing about the idea of moving.

I text back.

You so don’t have to. It’s your house you own it & v nice where you are.

He replies.

No cant move like a snake tight round my chest cant breathe Ah.

Oh God.

Okay.

I phone the emergency service. They tell me there’s an ambulance delay.

I’m not supposed to but I shoulder my clothes on. I get in the car and drive there. I leave the car in the loading bay along from his house and I stand outside the front. His house is in darkness. The dog hears me, barks a couple of times.

I text my father and tell him I’m here.

He replies.

Dont come in might be virus

I send one back.

I’m coming in

He replies.

Chain on door

I reply.

I’ll go round the back & break the kitchen window He replies.

Dearth of tradespeople to fix it dont be stupid My father, in the middle of an emergency, more worried about glaziers and his house than himself.

I dig a half-brick out of the flowerbed in the front garden and go round and smash the kitchen window.

—

Two years earlier.

My father is waiting for me on the path by a pile of cut-down trees in a clearing. It’s his birthday. He is his old self, I mean as opposed to his young self. The smell of cut wood is in the air and the space all around the pile of logs is trampled to mud and littered with woodchips.

Work well done by somebody, he says patting the side of the highest log. This one’s the age of me. I counted the, the. You know.

Rings, I say.

I bend down and pick up a piece of inner tree the size of my hand. It’s so light-coloured and fresh-smelling that I hold it to my nose then put it in my pocket.

Chip off the old block, I say. Wonder what they’ll end up making with these.

These’ll make something, all right, he says.

Firewood, I say.

Far too good for firewood, he says. They’ll be for construction.

Sleepers, I say. Beams.

No! he says as if I should know better. These are beech. Perishable.

Best for indoors. Floors, joinery. Suchlike.

I remember I’m supposed to say nothing really, just walk along, agreeing.

Good stuff, that, he says.

I can never help wondering, I say anyway, whether trees in a wood freak out when someone cuts down their neighbouring trees right in front of them.

Don’t talk rubbish, he says.

He looks round for the dog.

Come on, he says to the dog, not me. Let’s go.

Too happy, happy tree, I say.

He ignores me.

I know he’s thinking about the garden centre on the other side of the wood where we always go when we do this walk to have whatever soup they’re serving that day. I expect him to say, any moment, wonder if they’ll do the yellow fish soup today.

But then as we follow the bend of the path this is what he says, they don’t have to bother with all that happiness rot, trees. They’re just trees.

Then fifty yards further down the path he says, no such thing as a happy tree.

It’s from the poem, I say, by Keats, about just that, a tree in winter that doesn’t have to miss its summer greenness because trees don’t remember or regret anything, and that’s precisely why they’re happy, because they just keep on being trees, doing what trees do. Till, you know, someone cuts them down.

I wait a moment. Then I say,

The picture I painstakingly painted and gave you last Christmas. That’s a visual representation of the Keats poem the line’s from.

Silence.

Then he says,

all that learning, and all you’ve done with it is make a life’s work of for Christ sake painting words on top of one another so nobody can even read them.

Thanks for the critique, I say.

How would anyone ever know those words were in that painting? he says. Or any words?

But they are, I say. They’re all in there. That’s a picture of a poem and of all the words in that poem.

Visual representation. Just a slab of green, he says.

Green’s the only colour Keats directly draws attention to in that poem, even though it’s a winter poem, I say. Green felicity.

Visual representation, he says. Why not just paint a tree if you’re going to paint the words of a poem about a tree?

That’ll be why you left that picture I gave you in the garage under the old sweatshirt, I say. And that sweatshirt’ll be stuck to the oil paint now and the picture’ll be ruined. You know that, don’t you? Ruined.

I always thought, when you were growing up, that child, she’ll change the bloody world. You had every chance. But you went your own way. You

always went your own way.

You know, dad, I could’ve sold that painting of mine that I gave you several times over if I’d wanted and got several hundred pounds for it when I did, I say.

Have it back, he says. Have it back. Sell it. Get your money for it.

Yeah, and I can sell the sweatshirt alongside it as its companion piece, I say. We could go into business, you and me. I’ll do the painting, you do the ruining and we’ll both profit from it.

Business, he says. You. Don’t make me laugh.

I do fine, dad, I say.

No motivation. No ambition.

Different motivation. Different ambition, I say.

We both know we’re talking about me being what he still thinks, even in the 21st century world of new freedoms and tolerant understandings, is the wrong sexuality here.

The life you could’ve had, he says. But no. Part-time work. To fund your nonsense. Visual representations.

I like my life, I say. I’ve chosen it.

A life spent waiting for paint to dry so you can paint paint on top of more paint, he says. Selling one or if you’re really lucky two a year.

Money’s not my motivation, I say. It’s a discipline.

Painting words someone else has written one on top of the other. What the bloody hell’s the point of it?

The point is, I said, that the words are there whether you can read them or not.

Bloody stupid, he says.

Silence.

We walk on down the path in the grey-green of the spring.

Ten minutes of silence later,

your mother liked trees, he says.

Mm, I say.

My father likes my mother a lot more now than he did when she was alive.

She especially liked a row of poplar trees from a distance, he says.

Yes, I say. I remember.

She liked when they line a road like they do, he says.

Good to know, I say.

She liked a good tree, your mother, he says.

—

Three decades earlier.

My father is one of his younger selves. He is letting the younger me drive his van, him in the passenger seat, to the halls of residence in which I’ve been allotted a room for my first year at university in a city a hundred mile drive away. I passed my test six months ago. The first time I took the van out by myself I backed it into a Give Way sign and ruined the back bumper and the boot. He swore he’d never let me in the driver’s seat again.

Until now he hasn’t.

When we’ve arrived, driven up the leafy path to the halls car park, unloaded my cases and bags and ferried them up the three flights to the perfectly formed small room that’ll be the start to my life away from home, he’ll stand in the doorway, look at his watch and say, right then. Come on. You can give me a lift to the train station and if you manage that without any damage to the van and your driving’s as good as it was all the way here, then –.

He’ll hold out the van key towards me.

Yours for your years here, he’ll say.

What?

You’ll need a car, he says. To come home in. Regularly. Well, I mean, whenever you want to or need to, I don’t mean you have to.

But dad, I say. You need the van. For work.

Time I got a new one, he’ll say. Good excuse to.

No way, I’ll say. You can’t. We can’t afford it.

I’m doing it, he’ll say

He’ll throw the key so that I have to catch it.

Come on. Station, so I can catch the 4.15.

But back before any of this happens, when we’re still on the road and about halfway there, with me driving and him sitting in the passenger seat with his hand poised just above the handbrake, he says without turning his head,

tell me something. Say something about, I don’t know. Anything. You know. That way you have.

What way? I say.

With words, he says.

Oh, I say.

My mind empties of every word. I watch the sun glancing itself off the back of the car ahead of us on the road. It hits my eyes in the glance. I shade them.

Tell me something about today, he says.

Anything.

Uh, I say.

He turns the sound on the cassette player right down. Wings at the Speed of Sound. We’ve just heard the song that starts with the doorbell ringing and is about how a lot of people keep turning up at a door, people who sound local or are family plus some people who sound like they might be from history since one of the people at the door in the song is Martin Luther. The song repeatedly asks whoever’s listening to it to open the door and let all the people in.

Imagine if all those people in that song did turn up at your door, I say.

Imagine Martin Luther, I mean turning up.

Open the door quick before he uses it as a noticeboard, my father says.

Or maybe it means Martin Luther King, I say.

Definitely let him in, my father says. A brave good man in the world.

No. Let them all in. Whoever. Always honour everyone who comes to your door.

What if you don’t like them? I say. What if the people at the door are people who’ve come to beat you up or, I don’t know, take your home, or get rid of you because you aren’t the same religion or colour or sexuality or something? What if something about you’s put you on someone’s hate list?

Christ almighty, my father says.

He’s quiet for a minute. Then he says this.

All the same. Invite them in. Put the kettle on. What else you going to do?

I roll my eyes.

So, I say. Ask how many sugars they take then present your face to be punched?

Why are you thinking someone’s at your door because they want to punch you? he says. Your world’s a better place than ours was, girl.

Ask them if they take milk in their tea. Not much Widerstand in that, I say.

Not much –? he says.

It’s the German word for resistance, I say. I mean. Put the kettle on.

Pff.

Even I can hear how prissy I’m being now.

But next to me he’s gone respectful, impressed, which makes me feel even worse.

That’s what I mean. You’ve language, he says. That’s a power beyond any punching. And by putting a kettle on I mean polite. Welcoming whatever’s happening, whatever’s going on. That’s resistance too. Grace under pressure, grace under pressure, your mother said it all the time.

My father almost never mentions my mother. Now he’s talking about how he wonders whether or not she ever heard the song Wings did about giving Ireland back to the Irish.

I don’t know that song, I say.

You were only small. They banned it at the BBC. God knows why, sweet little song, it was hardly going to cause riots. I bet them banning it made her angry, wherever she was then. Wherever she is.

She’s in Windsor, I say. You know she is. She’s got somewhere to live.

She’s sorting herself out. She’s got a job. She works in the curtain shop.

She’d be proud of you today, wherever she is, I know that, he says. If she knew. College. Unthinkable, for me or her, a life like yours.

Here came my mother now at my door not with two or three knocks like normal people but with one clean hard thump to the ribcage.

Let her in?

She’ll be measuring curtain material right now, I say. She’ll be stretching it as far as her two hands can go on stretched-out arms, and lining the length of it up against the measuring stick on the counter.

Will she now? he says.

It’ll be really thick cotton material, I say, and its pattern will be flowery. And she’ll really dislike the pinks and blues and greens and how subtle they’re meant to be, how classy, and how muted in reality. And she’ll be struggling to overcome the urge in her to take that bolt of material, point it away from herself like a battering ram and hurl it with all her spirit’s integrity through the plate glass at the front of the shop.

My father huffs air through his nose.

Integrity, he says. I don’t know about the word integrity and your mother.

But she won’t do that. She’ll be standing in the shop after the woman who’s bought the curtains leaves, I say, the bell on the door has just finished sounding through the shop air, and you know what she’s thinking of?

He snorts anger beside me.

You, I say. She’s thinking of you.

Hm, he says.

She’s wishing she could’ve been the kind of woman who goes to a shop and buys curtains to put up in a house, I say. For you.

We drive on.

Your mother, he says a minute or so later.

He shakes his head.

She was a wild one, he says. That’s exactly what she’d do. Throw a bolt of curtain material at a curtain shop window and shatter it.

Good. Her spirit’s intact, then. At least what I imagine of her spirit given that I hardly know the woman who’s my mother.

I apologize to her in my head for taking liberties with that last image of her standing behind the counter in an empty shop wishing she was the kind of woman who’d be buying curtains to make a husband’s life look more like it should.

But maybe it’s true.

Maybe she does long to be someone completely other than we’d readily or rather imagine her. Also, it’s the image of her doing just that that’s freed him to talk admiringly about her determination to be herself.

Then it’s just us in silence, just the noise of the van round and under us moving us along, till I turn the sound on the cassette player back up.

The song playing now in the van is the one called Beware My Love.

—

Half a century earlier.

My father is a building contractor. He is home because it is Sunday.

Because there are no days off for builders he’s doing calculations at the dinette table for a sizeable contract. The table is covered with unrolled blueprints. The unwashed dishes from some of the meals we had this week are underneath the blueprints. He’s pinned the blueprint papers down at the corners to stop them from rolling up again using some of these dirty plates and a couple of little piles of my books off the shelf behind him.

I am seven.

Sizeable. Contract.

I mouth the words without saying them out loud.

He notices. He says,

stop doing that thing with your mouth.

I take a book off the top of the pile on the corner nearest to me and start reading it in the middle. It’s the one with Findhorn the unicorn on the cover. I open it at the page where the writing turns in front of your eyes into the shape of a horse.

He reaches over and takes the book out of my hands and closes it. He rolls his blueprints back off the bit of the table closest to me. He starts explaining to me how engines work.

He does this by opening this book at the back and with the pencil from behind his ear drawing on its blank inside cover the shape of an elf-hat, or a mountain, or a tent, or from my side of the table what looks like a capital letter V. At the top point he writes the word FUEL. Up one leg of the V he writes the word HEAT. Down the other leg he writes the word OXYGEN.

He points to the space inside the V.

Inside, because of this combining, that’s combustion, he says. The fuel heats up and burns. In the burning, the keeping the heat going when these three things meet, that’s where the energy comes from that drives the machine or makes whatever you need the fuel for work. One thing changes another thing into something else, and the result is? Is?

Something different, I say.

Something I wish you had more of. Energy.

Uh huh, I say.

I am not sporty enough for my father. I am weedy and not growing fast enough and since he started putting the white powdered stuff that’s supposed to make me grow into all my food I am eating even less.

So. Come on. Think of some fuels, he says. You’re the one that’s good with the words. Tell me some words for fuel.

You, I say.

What do you mean me? he says.

You’re a fuel. An old fuel, I say.

What? he says.

He hits me over the head with a rolled-up blueprint, but not too hard.

Tell me, come on, he says. Tell me what petrol is. Petrol is six shillings and eightpence a gallon, I say. You what? he says.

At the garage with the yellow and blue sign that has the head with the wings on its hat, I say.

My father looks at me like he can’t understand me. Then he starts laughing.

Six and eight a gallon at the National, he says. You’re right! That’s what petrol is!

I’m pleased. He only rarely laughs.

Tell me about the National, I say. When you were my age.

When I was small, a lot younger than you, he says, the National was still the forge, where they brought the town’s horses to be shod. The town was much smaller then, and where the National is now was the very edge of it, and I used to like to sit on the wall and watch Mr Duncan the farrier, he was always telling me how the smithies were all being converted one after the other all over the country into petrol garages, for cars. Not long now, he’d always say. This place’s not long for this world.

Tell me about you not sleeping and the horses, I say.

The horses, he says.

And your mother, I say.

I’ve told you a million times, he says.

Please, I say.

The faraway look comes into his eye. It always does when he’s anywhere near the word mother.

One night I was awake when I should’ve been asleep, he says. I was sitting up in the bed, all my brothers were asleep round me but I was sitting upright, straight as a gate. And my mother came in, she said, what’s the matter? Get down in that bed and off to sleep. And I told her I couldn’t sleep, I was worried one day there’d be no one left to put the shoes on any horses.

He looks at the pencil in his hands. He tucks the pencil behind his ear again.

Hay, I say.

Hey what? he says.

Old fuel, I say.

Don’t call me that again Sandy, don’t be impolite, or the back of my hand’ll polite you.

No, I say. Hay. It is old fuel. Horsepower.

Horsepower? he says. Oh. Hay. Ha.

And dad, I say. What does straight as a gate mean?

Well, it means –, he said. Well, I don’t exactly know what it means.

Is it a saying everybody says? I say. Or just you?

I don’t know, he says. I’ve always said it. I suppose it means a gate’s got to be put in straight, put in properly, or it’ll fall down or not open properly.

I think you just say it, or people just say it, because it rhymes, I say.

And you’re too clever for your own good, he says. What’s petrol. Six and eight at the National.

After that, for quite a long time, whenever we hear the word national, if someone mentions the petrol station or someone on TV talks about the national anthem or national savings, national security, national costume, national treasure, National Velvet, anything, my father will wink at me and shout across the room,

that’s what national means, isn’t it? A place you pay through the teeth for something that makes things, come on, makes them what?

Combust, I say like I’m meant to say.